There’s no getting away from it – being a WordPress theme developer is a truly multidisciplinary job.

At a minimum, you’ll find yourself straddling the worlds of design and development on a daily basis. And, regardless of whether you’re a one-person operation or working in a WordPress dev shop, business and marketing needs will also almost certainly never be far from your mind.

In this type of environment, it’s essential to actively maintain a list of key resources you can lean on for inspiration; that enable you to keep sharpening your skills and stay up to speed on each of your core areas.

In this article we’ve selected 12 of our favorite sites across four key disciplines to get you started. Each site is a no-fluff, regularly updated resource packed with actionable information. We’ve also included a small tip per site to help you get the most out of of each one.

Specialization, as Robert Heinlein so succinctly put it, is for insects. Fortunately, WordPress’ inherent flexibility means users are guaranteed not to fall into that particular trap.

Your average day as a WordPress site owner might see you fine-tuning server performance, preparing and editing multiple images, planning a content strategy, and/or delegating a range of minor tasks to a remote team.

In this type of multidisciplinary environment, the need for an optimized workflow and task-specific tooling is critical. Fail to sharpen your saw and your daily routine could easily descend into a mindless slog of avoidable busy-work which quickly cripples morale, flow and overall output.

This article will introduce you to fourteen essential tools you can use across different aspects of WordPress and your wider business to realize instant gains in productivity and performance.

There is, as Shakespeare so memorably put it, a tide in the affairs of men. At a certain point in your life as a WordPress developer you will face a choice: do you saddle up and take the next step for you and your business or stay stuck at your current level?

Get it wrong and you risk stalling your career and getting locked into an endless cycle of bad clients, money worries, and grinding day-to-day dissatisfaction. But productizing your WordPress business is the way to avoid this sorry state of affairs.

In this article, we’ll cover why you need to productize, provide concrete steps to get you started on the right track and give you some useful pointers towards further resources for the future.

Images are often the best part of a WordPress website. They catch the eye, set the mood, and invite the emotions to take part in what can otherwise be a boring experience.

However, image files are often the biggest files on the server, and they tend to affect page upload speeds more than anything else. With new display technologies such as Retina becoming more and more popular, and mobile device usage on the rise, it pays to keep your image quality up and your file size down.

To help face these challenges, this post will look at four valuable suggestions to make the best choices when it comes to image optimization.

Choosing between Single or Multi Page Designs sometimes requires a lot of thought. Here are a few guidelines that might help you.

Those familiar with WordPress’ history will know that it has its roots placed firmly in blogging.

But fast-forward to present day and you are arguably as likely to see a ‘traditional’ website running on WordPress than you are to see a blog. The world’s favorite Content Management System (CMS) has come a long way since its b2/cafelog days. And while creating a WordPress website that doesn’t operate as a blog is now a piece of cake, that added functionality opens up a veritable Pandora’s box of questions.

In this article I want to address one of those questions: should you choose a single page or a multiple page design for your WordPress website? With the growth in popularity of single page designs over the past year or so, it is a more relevant question than ever. Once you’re done reading this piece, you’ll know which option is right for you.

Again a rather large update that adds a lot of the features you requested

This one has a lot of love for users who always wanted to use the template builder on posts and products. You can now build beautiful custom posts and unique custom single product pages. Of course we got a lot of new elements, improvements to existing elements, new theme demos and a lot of smaller bugfixes as well.